White Knight Chronicles - a 'short' personal review

I'm so sorry I didn't post for a while now… but this just has a very simple reason: 

Nothing big happened these days, because I'm still sitting at home, bored, because I still can't go out due to I'm still in recovery time for my foot... _ _!

I'm not sure whether anyone is interested about this at all (except Sofi, she even said that she'd be interested...σ(^_^;) ), but maybe it could be a possibility to present the game I'm trying to kill my boredom with.

White Knight Chronicles  

(Original title: 白騎士物語)

To be honest, I was quite doubtful regarding this game. When I saw the cover, I was like: "Geez, it's some knight game..." (and I'm really not attracted to typical trash-medieval fantasy style, to be honest D: ). Anyway, as soon as the opening cutscene started, I wanted to scream like a little girl seeing Justin Bieber at the mall （;´▽｀A``

I must admit that I totally loved Power Rangers when I was a child, that I just LOVE huge monsters in video games and that I absolutely enjoyed watching Kamen Rider (仮面ライダー (engl: Masked Rider)） even as an adult. I don't want to spoil you, but I think it's okay to share the opening trailer with you:

(Please don't be surprised, it's the Japanese version because I really think that it fits the atmosphere MUCH better than the international (English) version... but if you're interested in checking out the English version, please visit Youtube by yourself ^^, )

So, regarding those facts, maybe it's not that surprising anymore that I fell for this game... (;^_^A  (even though it has some trash-medieval character as well....). Saa, "White Knight Chronicles" is actually already kinda "old" (I think it's from 2008... or something like that? I'm currently quite too lazy to check it (*￣Oﾉ￣*) ), which explains the 'bad' resolution (even though I'm not that spoiled with HD and stuff - and I personally don't think it's that bad ^^, ). 

White Knight

As soon as you start the game, you're allowed to create an own character, which is quite cool in my opinion (I also enjoyed doing this playing the Dragon's Dogma demo (which is quite more 'medieval', but has a nice gameplay. You can download it for free at PS-Store)). You got plenty of possibilities to create your personal character. Even though I took too long for that (because I love playing around with all these possibilities... |D ).

Let's come to the bad point about that: If you don't play that game online, but in the offline story mode, your character is a soulless retard without any facial expression, staring like a dork (´＿｀｡)

The name is very individual, I know |D It's based on a "pun" between me and some of my fellow students :'D

And, yes, I'm not kidding. Even if you can play your character in between, the main character (named Leonard) is quite more important for the story mode and he needs to be part in every important battle. And even if you can choose a speaking voice for your own character, you won't hear anything else than "Uaaaargh!" or "HUH!!", just like Zelda's character Link. As for me, I think it's quite a pity. At some point of the game, I gave up changing to Kwun in between, because it didn't make any sense for me anymore. Every 5 minutes I saw Kwun standing there, again, staring like a dork and not participating in most of the cutscenes either and just after that, the player is forced to take Leonard as his character again. Does it make sense? Why didn't they just allow you to play your own character ONLY online then, if he's just useless attachment...? Maybe I should ask those guys from Level-5 about that ゛(｀ヘ´#)

Well, what about the gameplay...? To be honest, I personally had some problems at the beginning (and even still in between, haha...). The fighting system is actually very easy, but has some severe problems. Sometimes you cannot switch your target properly, or if you already changed it, it automatically changes back to some other target which is MILES away, constraining you to hit your actual target and kills some precious fighting time, which is very important (especially if you transformed to a Knight).

Using items during a fight is actually quite easy as well - but because the fight won't pause if you switch to 'items', you'll have to learn to change your action bars (1-3 for actions, 4 for items, targets etc.) quite fast, without switching too far or disordered, so you lose lots of important time as well. I grant you that I often kinda groaned about that, just because I felt hacked off =_=;;

Additionally, the game has some strange - so called - 'save points', where they assert that the game will be saved "in between" (I never noticed not even ONE, by the way...).  You're gonna freak out if you died the first time (what I recently did - at a boss fight, containing 5 (!) bossfights without any time to recover, chill out or even change your party [I think I'm almost done with the game, by the way |D ]). That's annoying, but rather acceptable. A fact which made me stop playing for a day (instead of trying again right thereafter, like I would usually do) was the fact that NOTHING was saved. And if you want to reload immediately, it "costs" some experience points and - of course - you won't see the items you used at the battle never ever again. So I just shut down my PS, hoping that I just can "restart" that battle as if my first try never happened :')  For me, the most grueling thing about failing this fight was, that my enemy just needed one or two more hits to die...

(￣へ ￣ 凸

By the way, never ever try to update or re-arming your characters after you just passed a fight without finding a save place to do so. Monsters (and even the big ones, which kinda act like "path guards" and are compulsive combatants) do respawn within only a few minutes. And, as I said, this game is in real time, so it won't pause, even if you opened your character's skill surface in full screen. They will respawn, and they definitely attack you right away.

You might think about that in your individual way, for me, some of these facts are annoying. And unfortunately, the story is like chewing gum. It IS great indeed, but sometimes you will feel like they tried to keep you playing on synthetically, as if they wanted to add some more hours to the playtime, even if there's no further essence. Bummer.... (I especially think that this is one of the games' biggest drawbacks, because the characters as such are totally lovely (even though I don't like Leonard and his stupid princess, haha... |D ). Anyway, the other characters are neat!  ☆　

(Talking about the characters... please check out the leader of the Magis (villain) :*:・(￣∀￣)・:*: Doesn't he just look like one of Power Ranger's villains...?!)